The Cognitive and Psychological School Engagement of Young Offenders

The protective qualities of school engagement have a positive impact on students' social and academic outcomes.

It has consequently become a focus of research and its promotion is a priority of many organisations including the Youth Justice Board.

This thesis carries out an investigation into school engagement to increase our understanding of the construct and to identify ways that it can be promoted.

A systematic literature review is presented to examine the correlation between school engagement and a student's sense of school belonging.

The review concludes that there does appear to be a positive correlation between these two variables, although further research is needed to establish variations as a result of student characteristics (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity).

The review also discusses the variation in definitions of school engagement and argues that a multi-component model of engagement should be adopted (Appleton, Christenson and Furlong, 2008).

This argument is extended in the empirical paper in which the two under-researched components of cognitive and psychological engagement are studied. Its protective nature makes school engagement an important intervention objective for Youth Offending Teams and therefore young offenders are the target population of this study.

Young people completed questionnaires to measure their cognitive and psychological engagement and took part in interviews to explore their views.

Thematic analysis was conducted to identify themes reflecting young people's views on the indicators of cognitive and psychological engagement as identified by previous research, to explore what internal psychological processes mediate engagement and to investigate facilitators and barriers of engagement.

Main findings indicated that there is no correlation between questionnaire scores and young people's school attendance, that young people agreed with the research-identified indicators of cognitive and psychological engagement and that mediators and facilitators were underpinned by basic psychological needs for relatedness, competence and autonomy (Self Determination Theory).